Universities Tapped To Build Secure Net

Wes Felter writes "InfoWorld reports that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has enlisted five university computer science departments to develop a secure, decentralized Internet infrastructure. I thought the Internet was already decentralized, so I'm curious about what exactly they're fixing. The article quotes Frans Kaashoek from MIT PDOS, which is working on decentralized software such as Chord."

Comments

Re:Current Internet not *that* decentralized

[glwtta]

And because each replicates its data set to all other Root servers, catastrophic failure of one would bring down all of the others.

Um, very untrue - the primary root server replicates the data to the rest. If a non-primary root server goes down, you don't notice it. If the primary one goes down, the function is moved to any one of the rest (and you still don't notice it). Basically something like 3 or 4 of them have to go out before Joe InternetUser will notice any effect, and even then it would be somewhat inconvinient, not "catastrohpic". (This is what I rember from some article on the topic awhile back - it's not like I know anything about these things.)